And Never Let Her Go (15 page)

Tom stayed with Governor Castle until 1992. He had always wanted to run for political office himself; he thought he would make
a good attorney general for the state of Delaware. But he talked it over with some of the stronger Democrats, among them the Freels. Kevin Freel, who always said what he thought, while his brother Bud tended to be more enigmatic, told Tom to forget it. He was carrying too much family baggage on his back. His brothers' shenanigans would surely come back to haunt him if he ran for the highest law enforcement office in Delaware. Between his three brothers, the Republicans could dredge up everything from graft to drugs to rape and kidnapping, and he shouldn't think they wouldn't. Kevin warned him he would just be inviting a smear campaign. A Republican wag told Tom his campaign slogan would have to be “Tom Capano: The OTHER Capano.”

Moreover, despite his success in public office, Tom was not a natural politician. He had little talent for glad-handing and working a crowd. The thought of shaking hands with strangers and kissing babies actually scared him a little. Rather, his forte was in quiet behind-the-scenes mediation. People loved Tom in private; he seemed to lose color and verve in the spotlight. He was just a little too plodding, a little prissy on details and regulations.

Tom decided not to run for office after all, and then he accepted a partnership at the law firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick and Saul, the bond counsel for the state of Delaware and the city of Wilmington. He would run the public finance department. It was a plum job, but he hastened to point out to anyone who raised eyebrows that he wasn't hired because he would bring government bond clients to Saul, Ewing. “They already had it all,” he said. Both the city and the state did business with Saul, Ewing.

There were only two firms in the Delaware Valley that had large public finance departments, and Saul, Ewing (with principal offices in Philadelphia) was one of them. Tom would work in the Wilmington office, and as managing partner, he doubled the office staff, bringing in six partner-level attorneys. He was back in the private sector and in a position to make a very substantial salary. Setting the city and state bonds was very detailed work, but they were mostly multimillion-dollar deals, and the meticulous work paid well.

Tom's community service now filled many pages of his curriculum vitae. He was on the board of trustees at St. Mark's High School and Ursuline, Padua, and Archmere academies. He was a board member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, chairman of the Wilmington Parking Authority, in charge of the Bench and Bar Committee and the Delaware Supreme Court's Long Range Planning Committee, and of course, still a stalwart at St. Anthony's.

His devotion to Catholic education and good works in no way slowed his affair with Debby MacIntyre or, seemingly, caused him any conflict of interests. He felt he gave so much to everyone that he deserved the—for him—unguilty pleasures of adultery. He was, he believed, a very special man, a man who shouldn't be fettered by the rules that governed lesser men.

Tom Capano had over the years polished his knack for friendship and for drawing people to him. He was a highly skilled negotiator and mediator; he
knew
people so well, knew what they wanted and what they needed. He knew the law and the law's weaknesses. He had used his charm and his intelligence—buoyed by his political connections—to get all three of his brothers out of tight spots. And he had boundless confidence in his own ability to make things happen the way he wanted them to happen.

A
NNE
M
ARIE
F
AHEY
started her new job with Governor Tom Carper right after he was inaugurated in January of 1993. Her desk would be on the twelfth floor of the Carvel state building, just past the elevators. She and Sue Campbell Mast, Carper's executive assistant, would be the lions at the gate that all visitors would have to pass before they reached the inner sanctum of Carper's private offices. The two women had desks five feet apart. Sue would answer the governor's direct phone line, and Anne Marie would field all the other calls. She was now at the very center of what was happening in Delaware, an essential part of the government of her state.

Anne Marie would make a number of women friends in this new job, including Sue, Jill Morrison, and Siobhan Sullivan. Jill worked in Constituent Services, directing Delawareans with problems to the proper agencies, and Siobhan was a Delaware State Police officer who worked in the Executive Security Unit, which protected Governor Carper and his family. She had come on board in a transfer from Troop 9 in Odessa, Delaware, and started guarding Governor Carper in December of 1992. Anne Marie and Jill began work at the same time, in January.

The Wilmington staff wasn't that big and they all knew one another well. When the legislature was in session, most of Carper's staff of around twenty-five was in Dover, leaving only four or five
people in Wilmington. They were young and exuberant, although they contained their hilarity and kept their voices down on the twelfth floor, where the governor's office demanded respect. They tended to be a little loud and boisterous on the eleventh floor, where the interns' and Constituent Services offices were located. And Anne Marie's voice, speaking rapid and fluent Spanish to a Hispanic woman, became a familiar counterpoint to activities on the eleventh floor. She loved the language and practiced it often, against the day she would return to Spain.

Anne Marie and Jill rapidly became particularly good friends; they were both in their mid-twenties, and Jill had moved to an apartment a block from the house Anne Marie shared with Jackie and Bronwyn, so it was easy for them all to get together. Anne Marie introduced Jill to Ginny Columbus and her other close friends, and helped Ginny get a job in the governor's office.

Anne Marie and Jill got in the habit of having lunch together almost every day, and they went shopping together at the malls, walked when the weather was good, and often worked out on the machines at the Y. They also shared some of the perks that came with working in the governor's office—lots of free tickets to events or fund-raisers. While some of the functions turned out to be deadly boring, they weren't put off, and they were game to try almost anything they had tickets for. Neither was seriously involved romantically, and they never knew whom they might meet.

Jill was with Anne Marie on April 26, 1993, the night she first met Tom Capano. It was at Jim and Mary Alice Thomas's house on Red Oak Road in the Rockford Park section of Wilmington. The Thomases had a lovely home, which they opened up for a fund-raiser for the Women's Democratic Club. Kathy Jamison, who was the scheduler for Lieutenant Governor Ruth Ann Minner, had arranged for the guest speakers—Lynn Yakel and Governor Jim Florio. The turnout wasn't as good as Kathy had hoped, but there were about 150 people there, many of them attorneys. Kay Capano had bought a ticket in her own name, but she wasn't able to attend, so she sent Tom to represent their family. He moved easily through the crowd, chatting with old friends and others he had worked with in city and state government. He was forty-three, handsome in a subdued way with his expressive eyes and perfectly trimmed beard. As a younger man, when his hair was very dark, he had had a smoldering look about him, but now he looked much more benevolent, even though he didn't smile much.

Jill and Anne Marie didn't know a lot of people there, but it
was a good party with interesting speakers and a great buffet. They chatted with each other and tried to mingle with the crowd in as unself-conscious a way as possible. “It was at the end of the evening,” Jill remembered. “She spotted Mr. Capano and recognized him and Anne Marie approached him and introduced herself and said she thought that he might know her sister, Kathleen. Then she introduced me, and we had a little chitchat, a friendly first-time-meeting-someone conversation.”

Tom was clearly a lot older than the two young women, at least fifteen years older. But he was very pleasant as he and Anne Marie found that they knew many of the same people. Of course, they had both been close to the Freel family for more than twenty years—Tom through politics and Anne Marie because the Freels had always been good to her family. And they were both staunch Democrats. Tom talked to Anne Marie and Jill as if they were the only people there, giving them his full attention, and that was flattering because he was an important figure in the Democratic Party in Wilmington and they were virtual newcomers.

Tom's position at Saul, Ewing brought him to the governor's office in the Carvel state building occasionally, and after that night he often paused at Anne Marie's desk to exchange a few words. Jill Morrison was aware that Anne Marie had lunch with him once in a while over the late spring and summer of 1993. Since Jill and Anne Marie usually had lunch together, when Ann Marie begged off and said she had other plans, Jill would ask, “Who with?” and sometimes it was Tom Capano. Jill didn't think anything of it.

“Anne Marie was just a very friendly person, and she explained that she was friends with him,” Jill recalled, “and [said] they would have good conversations, and he relied on her advice. That's the way she was, so I found nothing odd at that point.”

Sometime in the autumn of that year, Anne Marie told Jill that she was going out to dinner with Tom. She mentioned it offhandedly, as if it was a last-minute invitation. She asked to borrow a raincoat since the night had turned chilly, the wind was whipping fallen leaves around, and she hadn't worn a coat to work that day.

Somehow, going out to dinner with a man seemed more like a date than just having lunch during a workday. The next day, Jill's curiosity got the better of her and she asked Anne Marie how her dinner date had gone. “She told me about the restaurant, and that it was a nice evening—that Mr. Capano had ordered the food for her. I asked her, ‘Did he kiss you?' and she said, ‘Yes.' ”

Women who are close friends ask each other things like that, although
Jill was a little surprised at Anne Marie's answer. She didn't question her, but she wondered what kind of a relationship Anne Marie had, or contemplated having, with a married man so much older. Anne Marie had confided that Tom was about to have his forty-fourth birthday. She and Jill were only twenty-seven. Even so, she referred to him as Tommy, a name he apparently preferred. She always called him that.

Jill knew her friend well enough to know that she wouldn't find out any more than Annie wanted to tell. “She was always saying about herself,” Jill quoted, “‘The more you push me in one direction, the more I go in the other direction.' And I did not want to push her. I figured if people want to tell me something, or confide in me, they will do it in their own time.”

And apparently, Anne Marie had nothing she wanted to talk about with Jill, at least nothing about Tom Capano. She certainly had no exclusive arrangement with him; she had other dates, with men closer to her own age. She could be dramatic sometimes, and impossibly romantic, but it was clear to anyone who knew Annie well that she yearned to be in love, to be married, to have children of her own.

Men so often disappointed Anne Marie—or maybe it was that she shot herself in the foot because of the way she seemed to fear rejection. As beautiful as she was, she didn't see herself that way. If a man promised to call and didn't, she was convinced he would never call again—certain that
she
had said or done something to scare him off. And all the time she was absolutely lovely, with a figure both lush and angular with her full breasts and long arms and legs. Her eyes were wide and blue under heavy brows, and she had such thick, curly hair that it tumbled heavily down around her face unless she swept it up on her head and let tendrils escape. Her complexion was pure Irish, freckled skin that was suffused with pink washes when she felt emotion or embarrassment.

And Anne Marie was often caught unaware by both, although her defense system was locked in place so firmly that someone had to know her really well to see it. She seemed so happy and so confident, but she was as vulnerable as a wildflower growing on a freeway.

O
NE
night in the fall of 1993, Jackie Binnersley came home about eight after working out at the gym. She was startled to see Anne Marie sitting on the couch in their living room with a man. Jackie recognized him but would never have expected to find him in her own living room. He was well known around Wilmington. What
surprised Jackie the most was the intimate way Annie was sitting with him on the couch. They were drinking wine, and a bottle of Rosemont merlot—Anne Marie's favorite—sat on the coffee table.

“They were facing each other,” Jackie said. “As soon as I walked in, I detected
something.
I just felt uneasy. Body language tells a lot—you could just tell by the way they were sitting that there was some contact there.”

Anne Marie was leaning toward her visitor, apparently entranced, her cheeks flushed. Jackie knew who Tom Capano was, and she knew he was married and had children. It seemed totally out of character for Anne Marie to be sitting there with him, drinking red wine. “She wasn't promiscuous at all,” Jackie would recall. “She was very reserved, conservative, never had guys over to the house . . . but that night she had her cleavage showing.”

Anne Marie usually wore tailored shirts or blouses with high, rounded necks. But now the top three buttons of her blouse were definitely undone. It was an awkward moment and Jackie apologized for intruding. Anne Marie quickly recovered her composure and introduced Jackie to Tom.

After he left, Jackie confronted Anne Marie. “What's going on?” she asked bluntly. “Why is this guy here? He's a married man. Why is he over here drinking a bottle of wine?”

“Oh, Jackie,” Anne Marie said. “We're just friends.”

Jackie never totally bought that explanation, although Anne Marie tried to convince her that there was nothing the least romantic about her being with Tom Capano. They had a work relationship and she couldn't
not
talk to him.